Whenever I have an attack of helplessness I feel as though my soul is being detached from my body. I feel as though my essential strength is drained out of me. It’s a kind of dying.

On the contrary whever I feel I can make a difference in a given situation or when I am aware I can influence somebody I feel an inner glow as though I am radiating light. I know I can handle anything then; I am assured of a connection to somebody greater than myself. This sounds like I am attributing personal characteristics to the Supreme Being ala Rabbi Darfour”s treatise: anthropomorphizing God.

A simple example of the above is when I get difficult answers to my crossword puzzles. Funny how I feel so empowered by crossword puzzles. Many times when I feel gitated I lose myself in a crossword puzzle. Engrossed I enter into the zone of what Martha Beck calls the Infinity Loop. My husband experiences this when he meditates while swimming. It’s true, one can do wonders when the mind relaxes.

When I face the unknown no matter in what form, mundane or lofty I experience a level of faithlessness. I worry about our daughter in London. I worry about Emil. Of course I worry about myself!

I agonize over what delivered food to order to stay healthy. I feel anxious over reminders related to our picked-up/delivered laundry. I even fret over how best to shorten the dreaded task of defrosting the fridge.

Whenever I wake upbetween 1 AM and 2:30 AM I hear the unwanted barking of dogs and strain to hear the good omens of roosters crowing in various pitches. Quaint but there are roosters in metropolitan Vito Cruz lined by rows of condominiums, punctuated by shops like Jollibee and McDonald’s. Last year I spotted a rooster on the rooftop of one of the neighboring condos.

After all in Singapore in 2007 while walking to the Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart I chanced on roosters outside an Indian temple. Urban planning?

It starts with a disturbance in my system. Several things don’t go my way: I type with effort and with a single key accidentally touched I erase paragraphs; or I misplace a book; or my husband changes his schedule for the day; or worse at wee hours of the morning I am jolted out of sleep by the noise of people on the unit above ours.

I feel pains all over my body. My thoughts are a mess. My emotional state is definitely not conducive to attracting pleasant energies. Sometimes I feed this negativity so this goes on longer than it should.

Then out of the blue, perhaps it’s true there is an angel guarding me. At certain times, I suspect I need not just an ordinary angel but one of the archangels. Gradually, ever so slowly I realize what has been happening.

For almost a year now I awaken myself through the Ho’oponopono scheme. As I repeat the litany of “I’m sorry”,
“I love you”, “I thank you”, I usually feel as though the many entanglements imprisoning me are loosening, setting me free. It feels as though in a cauldron stimuli,emotions, connections all bearing different vibrations are trying to unite into a harmonious pattern.

As soon as I consciously make a decision to snap out of the chaos I feel that something breaks out of the murky waters. Thus comes into creation a significant new idea. This is my personal creation; thus an important idea manifests.

According to Esther and Jerry Hicks, as long as you continue to beat the drum of injustice, unfairness or that which is unwanted, you will hold yourself apart from the improvement.

For months I tried to look for a solution to the traffic problem in Vito Cruz in front of Grand Towers where we live. I wrote 2 newspaper columnists to no avail. I wanted to let the vice mayor know of the problem through a colleague of my husband in a university but the meeting did not push through. I egged some administrators of our building to act on the problem. I asked some of the employees to post complaints on Facebook. Clearly my efforts were practically useless. The old FIGHT approach did not work.

I can no longer try the FLIGHT approach because relocating is not an option. At my age, moving to another home is unthinable. Besides it is not only the physical constraints we will have to deal with; it is much more the financial burden. It’s true what Martha Beck wrote about the “fight” or “flight” responses no longer being workable in the 21st century.

I decided to be positive about the problem and prayed the Ho’oponopono way. Once in a while, early in the morning traffic enforcement men would clear the area of side walk vendors and parked taxicabs. There would be raids against the countless pedicabs blocking the street.
I was no longer angry. I suppose Michael Tamura was right: Spirit as consciousness – energy transforms into the very atoms that make up the material world. Spirit changed me, not the situation I was in and still am.

Much of my social conditioning has come from a perspective of scarcity and lack. I grew up with the beatitudes as a kind of wish list. reasoning from Einstein’s theory that you cannot solve any problem from the same level as its source, there was seemingly no way I could be set free from my situation. Any action taken from a plce of scarcity cannot be productive.

I was fifty years old when I chanced upon books about abundance. One of my earliest books that awakened me to a positive and glrious world was Gary Quinn’s “Living in the Zone”. It reminded me convincingly that as a child of God the world was mine. I felt cheated; all the years of compliance within a religion that taught that man was created to the image and likeness of God yet limited me to a life of sacrifice and deprivation.

Eventually in Singapore I discovered the books of Esther and Jerry Hicks. Their statement of empowerment was:
Control over the way you feel – over your response to situations is not only the key to your consistent happiness but to everything you desire as well.
Moreover they continued: only when you are willing to find a thought, any thought that brings you a feeling of relief can you begin your trek up the emotional scale in the direction of love and appreciation that represents who you really are.

According to Joe Vitale … your conscious mind is aware of only 15 bits of information while there are 15 million bits happening each time. According to Martha Beck the verbal region processes about forty bits of information per second. The nonverbal processes about 11 million bits per second. Martha Beck favors wordlessness naturally. Vitale and Beck use different statistics to describe how inadequate the conscious mind is.

On many occasions I experience this inadequacy while i work on my daily crossword puzzles. When I get stuck and can’t gt the answer I usually do something else. When I do something I don’t like, like housework, I get frustrated and the cloudiness of my mind worsens. When I relax and especially when I go to sleep I usually get answers I previously could not access. Sometimes I get answers while eating something I like.

This is a far cry from the tiring process of studying during my college years especially when a lot of memory work was involved. There was no time to relax. I felt I needed all the answers immediately. Had I known the information from Vitale and Beck, I would have loved school life more. Needless to say many years ago school life was simpler. There was no college thesis then much less APA rules to give students nightmares. There were no cellphones to be checked every so often. There were no computers either. It was an age where there were fixed answers for every question asked in the classroom. I managed to have some fun in school even under a regime of authoritarian discipline. Our fun was a whole lot of silliness by the standards of the youth of today.